Escaping His Drama

Last week Dan Drake explained how DARVO (deny, attack, reverse, victim, offender) can be used by an SA (or abusive person) to gaslight his wife and protect his addiction. This brought to mind another dynamic seen all too commonly in SA/PSA marriages: the drama triangle.

Stephen Karpman, a student in the transactional analysis school of psychotherapy, first published his drama triangle theory 50 years ago. It quickly became popular with therapists as a way of identifying and explaining many of the unhealthy relational interactions they were seeing between people, particularly people in a close relationship.